Delhi Sultanate

6 Key excerpts on "Delhi Sultanate"

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  Islamic Civilization in South Asia

  A History of Muslim Power and Presence in the Indian Subcontinent

  • Burjor Avari(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 The Delhi Sultanate at its Zenith (1206–1351)

  The Ghurid conquests between 1186 and 1206 eventually led to the establishment of what is called the Delhi Sultanate. This was essentially a regional North Indian power, although during its zenith its territorial boundaries extended southwards too. The fact that it was regional should not mislead us into thinking that other Indian states in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had the capacity to challenge its might. The sultanate lasted from 1206 until the advent of the Mughals in 1526, but from 1351 onwards its power markedly declined.

  Before 1206, apart from Sind, Muslim authority in India was confined to Punjab and the frontier lands between present day Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Ghaznavids and Ghurids were dynasties essentially shaped and influenced by the political conditions of the eastern Iranian, Transoxanian and Afghan regions. While the Turkish and Persian influences that they had brought into India continued after 1206, from then on the sultanate matured and developed essentially within the Indian heartland; and Indian cultural influences succeeded in making it an Indian polity, distinct from the Iranian or Central Asian. It was simultaneously a Muslim authority and, in that respect, it was alien to the vast majority of Hindu Indians. Over time, how ever, the sultans of Delhi charted out a balanced strategy of survival and domination in an alien religio-political landscape, which helps explain the relative longevity of the system they established.

  Sultans and Nobles

  The sultanate was an authoritarian monarchy: there was no question of democratic politics. On the other hand, the possession of the throne did not entitle a sultan to rule with unchecked powers. Although wielding great authority and sizeable patrimony, each sultan had to be conscious of the sensibility of military and religious grandees around him. Whenever a sultan trampled on that sensibility, his fate was sealed, which happened more often than not.

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  Muslim Rule in Medieval India

  Power and Religion in the Delhi Sultanate

  • Fouzia Farooq Ahmed(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  INTRODUCTION The Delhi Sultanate was established as a corollary of military expeditions by the Ghaznawids (352–582/962–1186) and Ghūrīds (558–602/1163–1206) that extended the eastern Islamic frontiers into Gangetic plains. The successful rulers of both these dynasties carved out principalities in northern India and established garrison towns and colonies, many of which later became the political and military strongholds of their legatees; the Delhi sultans. This work offers insight into regime formation, regime perpetuation and regime disintegration of Muslim states within Indian settings. It also provides additional understanding of the policies of sultans and their ruling class that formed a religious, racial and linguistic minority whose religious and cultural symbols and rituals captured an attempt at moral validation of their power. In the process, this book describes the political dynamics of medieval Muslim states in non-Muslim societies. The Delhi Sultanate is generally perceived as an exceptionally centralised political structure; nevertheless there was a visible asymmetrical distribution of power on the geographical level, making it a segmentary state, 1 comprised of a cluster of military strongholds and taxed agrarian hinterlands. The Delhi sultans ruled territories of northern India from a core region of control in Delhi and its adjacent territories, which gradually expanded – yet the borders of the sultanate fluctuated frequently. Under stronger rulers the sultanate expanded. These annexations, following this expansion policy, occasionally brought some areas of south India under direct control and reduced others to the status of tributaries. The affiliation of the eastern provinces, including Bengal, also hinged upon the strength of the rulers. The weaker rulers were unable to command and control, leaving these territories to either rebellious governors or unruly local elements

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  A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, 2 Volume Set

  • Finbarr Barry Flood, Gulru Necipoglu(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  The phenomenon of colonization is so firmly associated with European domination of Asia, Africa, and the Americas that it is easy to overlook its pre‐modern history within non‐western societies. States like the Delhi Sultanate were not only imperial in the sense that they were multiethnic polities ruling over diverse regions, but they also depended on colonies of settlers from the metropole as a means of establishing political control in conquered territories. We will here refer to this process as colonization, reserving the term “colonialism” for the specifically modern European form.

  The Delhi Sultanate’s colonization of the Deccan began with a series of ambitious campaigns that demonstrated Delhi’s military superiority and resulted in the collapse of the three Indic polities that had previously dominated the region – the kingdoms of the Yadavas (1187–1318), the Kakatiyas (1163–1323), and the Hoysalas (1192–1342). In the immediate aftermath of these conquests outside settlement of the region was limited, and concerted attempts were made to incorporate defeated local rulers and their subordinates as loyal vassals of Delhi. When this strategy proved unsuccessful, Delhi brought the region under direct rule, settling larger numbers of military and administrative personnel and charging them with the task of imposing north India’s Persianate and Islamic political culture upon the region. For a brief period in the 1320s, attempts were even made to transfer the entire population of Delhi to Daulatabad, in response to the southward shift of the sultanate’s center of gravity. The forced exodus was disruptive and unpopular among Delhi’s citizens, and most eventually returned to Delhi. But this wholesale migration of a broad cross‐section of Delhi’s population – including not only members of the ruling elite and administrative bureaucrats but also religious figures, merchants, and craftspeople – had a profound effect on the subsequent development of Deccani politics, culture, and art.

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  A History of Asia

  • Rhoads Murphey, Kristin Stapleton(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Source: Alberuni’s India: An Account of the Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Geography, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws and Astrology of India about A.D. 1030 , Volume 1, K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd., 1910; Based on a poem of a Rajput lady from H. G. Rawlinson, India: A Short Cultural History (New York: Praeger, 1965), p. 228.

  The armies of the Delhi Sultanate, like those of the Ottomans and other Turkish states, owed their strength in large part to mamluks , usually Turks bought in their youth as slaves and then trained as full-time professional fighters. They were an outstandingly disciplined force, but like many lifetime mercenaries they were not above an interest in power and in its rewards. Military commanders at the head of mamluk troops could be formidable political contenders. The ruthlessness and often extreme cruelty of many of the sultans provided frequent motives for revolt. Many of the rulers of Delhi began their careers as mamluk fighters, and so the regime is also known as the “slave dynasty.”

  In general, the sultanate succeeded only partially and for brief periods in becoming an effective administration for the areas it controlled in the north. The records we have tell us about power rivalries, intrigues at court, tax policies, coups, civil wars, and the abortive efforts to invade the south, but we have little concrete evidence of how much these petty affairs of state affected the lives of most ordinary people. Political power was highly concentrated in Delhi, leaving much of the sultanate’s domains under local rulers with a good deal of autonomy in practice. It seems likely that, after the first half century or so of ruthless plunder, conquest, slaughter, and intolerance, most people in northern India were left largely to themselves as long as they paid both land taxes and the jizya.

  The main impact of the sultanate on India was probably to implant a deep mistrust of politics, government in general, and Islam in particular, where it was used as the basis of state policy. Few monuments remain from this generally oppressive period in north Indian history. In broader cultural terms, these centuries did, however, see a fusion of originally Hindu elements with the Iranian influences brought in with the Turkish conquerors. Like the Mughals who followed them, they were the agents of a largely Persian culture, whose richness and variety in time found ready acceptance among many Indians. What we now think of as “traditional” Indian poetry, music, architecture, painting, the languages of northern India and their literatures, all in fact derived their present forms from this fusion. Islam and Hindu-Muslim differences proved to be neither a bar to such cultural hybridization nor a source of conflict, except where it was made an issue in political and military matters. Religion was far less important than other aspects of culture, and proved no barrier to cultural mixing.

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  From Indus to Independence - A Trek Through Indian History

  Vol VII Named for Victory : The Vijayanagar Empire

  • Sanu Kainikara(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • VIJ Books (India) Pty Ltd

    (Publisher)

  The above claim however, provides a false impression. Out of the five provinces, only Devagiri was fully under the direct control of Delhi with the other four prophesying nominal allegiance. Further, the bulk of the population in the region did not accept Delhi rule. On the other hand it must be admitted that territorially, the Delhi Sultanate reached its zenith under Muhammad bin Tughluq. Even though the peninsular region was not under the direct rule of the Tughluqs, their influence and sway over the region was unmistakable. At the peak of the Tughluq reign, their writ ran from Lahore in the north-west to Dwarasamudra in the south, and from Sindh and Gujarat in the west to Lakhnauti in the east.

  The Delhi Sultan’s system of parcelling out the conquered lands as ‘iqtas’, or military fiefdoms, to Muslim chiefs, nobles and commanders in return for producing a laid down number of soldiers for the Sultan’s army led to incessant feuds between the nobles. The region was never stabilised under the Delhi Sultanate, continuing in a state of turmoil for the next few centuries. Under these conditions, the region was ripe for rebellion.

  ‘The Muslim conquest of the Deccan was nothing more than a mere military occupation. Fired by the lust of dominion and plunder, the Muhammadans carried death and destruction wherever they went, and reduced the Hindus, even of the far south, to a state of extreme misery and helplessness. No institutions were devised for the better government of the conquered peoples; religious toleration was not extended to them, and the provincial satraps always behaved as independent rulers within their jurisdiction.’

  Ishwari Prasad,History of Medieval India, pp. 390-91.

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  Chapter 2

  UPRISINGS, REVOLTS AND REBELLIONS

  B

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  India in the Persianate Age

  1000–1765

  • Richard M. Eaton(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  It also broke from Delhi’s architectural tradition by asserting its indigenous character. The motifs of its many prayer niches reveal a successful adaptation, and appreciation, of the aesthetic traditions of the delta’s former Pala and Sena rulers. 22 On the other hand, it went over the heads of Delhi stylistically, conveying an imperial aura that recalls the grand style of pre-Islamic Persia. The shadowing effect produced by the alternating recesses and projections on the exterior of the multi-storeyed western wall resembles the external façade of the Taq-i Kisra palace of Iran’s Sasanian dynasty (AD 225–641), located in Ctesiphon near modern Baghdad. The mosque’s central nave, moreover, was covered with a huge barrel vault, an unusual feature having no antecedent in India, but which had also been used in the Taq-i Kisra. Finally, whereas Bengal’s earlier rulers had been content with being merely first among ‘kings of the East’, Sultan Sikandar Shah – whose very name, ‘Alexander’, associated him with imperialism – portrayed himself in the mosque’s inscription as the most perfect among the kings of Arabia and Iran, without even mentioning the kings of South Asia, where he was actually ruling. 23 SULTANATES OF THE DECCAN: THE BAHMANIS AND VIJAYANAGARA The Deccan in the fourteenth century witnessed a pattern similar to that of Bengal: the political expansion of the Delhi Sultanate, the diffusion of Persianate culture, and rebellion followed by the establishment of not one but two independent regional sultanates. In 1342, as his caravan lumbered southwards from Delhi to the Tughluqs’ co-capital of Daulatabad, Ibn Battuta described the road he was using as ‘bordered with willow trees and others in such a manner that a man going along it imagines he is walking through a garden; and at every mile there are three postal stations. .

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